Anthony Ippolito on becoming Stallone and going the distance for ‘I Play Rocky’

Anthony Ippolito is in the midst of the kind of hyper-scheduled, dizzying promotional blitz that many actors hope for but rarely experience. “It’s a weird period of time,” he says over Zoom. “It’s a part of the job of acting that I didn’t really think about.”

The Long Island native, 26, who first caught the industry’s eye with a well-received portrayal of Al Pacino in the 2022 Paramount+ series “The Offer,” is commanding new attention for his performance in a similarly high-risk, high-reward project: playing Sylvester Stallone in “I Play Rocky,” the Peter Farrelly-directed film about the low-budget struggle to make the iconic 1976 boxing movie.

Ippolito has been appearing at festivals and special advance screenings since the film’s auspicious debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where it began building strong word of mouth as well as life-altering possibilities for its star, whose performance has been called “transformative,” and “career-making.”

“I’m slowly trying to get my bearings with this part of it — it’s pretty foreign,” he says. Ippolito, who started acting as a kid and pursued it more seriously after playing young Adam Sandler in 2015’s “Pixels,” is self-aware enough to be skeptical about the current hype, which he is still figuring out how to talk about. “I’m taking things as they come, trying not to listen to too much of the noise.”

Not listening to outside noise is a big part of how Ippolito ended up in “I Play Rocky.”

“Nobody was asking me to audition,” he tells The Times from the Savannah Film Festival in Georgia, where he’s due to receive the Breakthrough Award in a few hours. Ippolito has an easy charm and nonchalance about him, possibly due to being jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, but his general vibe is relaxed. Dressed casually in a bulky patterned sweater, he takes thoughtful pauses to answer certain questions, absentmindedly running his hands through an enviable mop of hair.

“I had heard bits and pieces of Stallone’s story just growing up as an actor myself,” he says, not to mention occasional comments about his passing resemblance to Stallone, with those lush brown curls and heavy-lidded eyes. When he heard about Farrelly’s film, he let his hopes rise.

“I didn’t know if I could, but I wanted to be in the conversation for it if possible,” he recalls. Ippolito started watching as much of Stallone’s work before “Rocky” as he could find. “Because he was an unknown actor at the time, a lot of the footage he’s in for only a couple minutes — there’s an episode of ‘Kojak,’ ‘The Lords of Flatbush,’ ‘Death Race 2000.’ Some of these he’s only in a scene or two, but watching that and interviews he did around the time of ‘Rocky’ was the first step.”

Ippolito, whose natural speaking voice is a completely different tone and register from Stallone’s grumble — it’s lighter and more laid-back — eventually put himself on tape performing a few “Rocky” scenes with the help of a cousin who “held a lamp in the corner” of his grandmother’s basement. Why the basement? “Oh, that part of her house was very stuck in the ’70s,” he says. “And, I mean, I love my grandma.”

Fittingly, for the retelling of a story about an iconic underdog, Ippolito’s tape made its way to Farrelly. “People keep asking me, “How’d you get him there?’ I say, ‘I didn’t — he got himself there,’ ” says the “Green Book” director. “We hadn’t started searching yet. And we’re like, ‘The search is over.’ He’s the only guy we looked at.”

Gearing up to shoot “I Play Rocky” required Ippolito to add the only thing lacking in his basement audition: the physical bulk of Rocky Balboa. Ippolito’s natural build is more slender than Stallone’s for Rocky, so he started training hard with weights, eating a ton of protein-rich meals and boxing for roughly 18 months before production began.

“I had to learn how to hit a speed bag, which was a new thing and wasn’t very easy at the beginning, but I got there,” he says. Ippolito humbly talks about the extensive prep like it’s an everyday thing that anyone would do in his situation. Farrelly knows that is not the case.

“It’s not natural, it’s total work,” he says. “He gained 40 pounds, got his face punched in the gym and he’s a really good actor who’s smart as hell. He also knew the subtle difference between Stallone and Rocky, and he had them both fully formed by the time he showed up on the set.”

“You’re looking at Anthony because it’s a generational performance,” says “I Play Rocky” director Peter Farrelly. “He didn’t walk around as Stallone, thankfully. That would be annoying.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

While Stallone was not directly involved with “I Play Rocky,” he was consulted about the script and Ippolito’s casting. The two connected before cameras rolled. “He was kind enough to share a lot of what the experience of making the film was, and a lot of the dark times that he was stuck in before and while he was writing the script,” says Ippolito. “It was a very lonely period of time in his life. I appreciated his vulnerability in telling me everything he did.”

The only child of Anthony, a chiropractor, and Lorraine, who works in the tech industry, Ippolito was encouraged to audition for commercials after his baseball skills impressed a friend of his parents. “I went on a ton of commercial auditions and didn’t do a ton of commercials,” he recalls. “I remember going into one for a Cheerios commercial and being like, ‘Do you have Honey Nut Cheerios? I don’t really like just normal Cheerios.’ The executives from Cheerios were like, ‘All right, we can’t use this guy.’ ”

Ippolito has maintained that casual can-do attitude about the profession, taking classes and working with acting coaches along the way, but “The Offer” and “I Play Rocky” have become calling cards.

At this time last year, Ippolito and Farrelly were mid-production on their 34-day shoot for “I Play Rocky,” most of which was filmed in New Jersey, except for three days on location in Philadelphia, where the original was filmed in just 28 days. He remembers re-creating the famous training sequence where Rocky jogs up the steps in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

“I couldn’t believe that I was finally going to get to go up those steps,” he says. “To do it after going through the process of trying to get the part and then to be in those sweats, running up them for the first time, was pretty surreal.”

That part of the shoot went off mostly according to plan, save for Farrelly having to call in a favor to get permission to move the Rocky statue, a tourist attraction that now sits atop the steps. A crew member noticed a name among the museum’s donors who turned out to be Philadelphia native Brian Roberts, current CEO of Comcast, which owns Universal, the studio that made Farrelly’s “Green Book.”

“I called Brian,” the director remembers. “I said, ‘I hate to bug you because it’s not your movie, but these guys are being difficult. They won’t move the statue. Is there anything you could do?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll look into it.’ And then the next morning it was gone.”

The day prior, they filmed Rocky’s sprint along the harbor, which Ippolito still can’t believe Stallone did wearing ’70s-era Converse: flat-bottomed shoes that have no cushioning or support for running. “Everybody thinks we sped that scene up,” Farrelly says. “We did not speed that up. That kid’s an athlete and he outran the camera car. We had to stop for 20 minutes to get under the camera car and fix it so it could keep up with him.”

Ippolito happily put everything he had into the performance, especially when it came to replicating the classic “Rocky” scenes, which included drinking a glass of raw eggs. “I mean, you only get to do this sort of thing once,” he says.

The actor has a charmingly self-deprecating way of talking about his work and his experience so far. He didn’t plan on being here. “She hasn’t seen it yet but I’m excited for her to see it,” he says about that grandmother who let him use the basement. It’s a sweet aside you could imagine Stallone himself saying.

Farrelly, who has been around the block with Hollywood highs and lows, is happy to brag about his star and his potential. “It was very easy to direct him because he knew the character better than I did,” he says. “You’re looking at Anthony because it’s a generational performance. He didn’t walk around as Stallone, thankfully. That would be annoying. To me, it’s also more impressive that he’s himself, and then you go ‘Action!’ and he becomes someone else.”

The director can’t wait for more people to discover him. “I think he’s a little shell-shocked,” adds Farrelly. “It’s hard when you go your whole life being treated normally and all of a sudden over a one-month period the whole world adores you. It kind of reminds me of Stallone after ‘Rocky.’ He was suddenly thrust into the limelight.”

For now, Ippolito is trying to stay present and enjoy the ride, which currently involves back-to-back travel and promotional obligations. “It’s important to set certain boundaries,” he says. “I’m glad that I’ve been acting for a little while and this kind of thing isn’t happening when I’m 15, for instance. I don’t know how some younger actors deal with that, but I’m trying to figure it out as we go.”

Ippolito relies on family, close friends and other hobbies to keep him grounded when he’s not working.

“I like to paint,” he says. “I like to read. I like to go to the movies with my friends and stuff like that. But honestly right now I, unfortunately, am just sleeping. This is the true answer. I could throw a Tolstoy novel at you or I can just tell you that I’m passing out on these flights.”

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